Notes and Comments
THE PRINTING TRADES DISPUTE.
ASQUITH’S WHITEWASHERS.
Mr. Frank Smith has passed from the Salvation Army to the Labour Movement and from the Labour Movement to the Salvation Army until one hardly knows where he is at any given time. At present he appears to be in the Labour movement as the secretary of a side-tracking, self-appointed Committee, who advise the unemployed to deputise and to beg of their masters to recognise the “right” of their slaves to work, instead of pointing out that they, the slaves, should organise to end their slavery and establish their right to live. In this connection he has a bone to pick with the “Labour” Party in the House of Commons.
He complains that the “Labour” members are permitting, without protest, the Liberal Cabinet to fool with the unemployed question, and wonders what it is “that is sapping the fight out of the majority of the Labour members?” “What is it,” he asks, “that appears to be turning the lions into lambs ?” He suggests that they are forgetting that they are still agitators, with a wider platform and a greater opportunity to push the war into the camps of the enemy, and are attempting the role of “statesmen,” and adds that they will lose their way and get side-tracked, for the politicians can beat them at the game of bluff every time.
The Executive of Mr. Smith’s Committee includes G. N. Barnes, M.P., J. Keir Hardie, M.P., and J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P. Has Mr. Smith discussed the matter with his Executive or does the Committee merely consist of Mr. Smith, and the pretence of an Executive merely part of a “game of bluff” which Mr. Smith, as well as his “Labour” Party friends, play so well ?
Now why should the “Labour” M.P’s be expected to “put up a real fight in the House”? They were not elected to put up a fight. Men who will throw over their principles of independence in order to secure votes, as did so many of the few Labour members who ever professed any, are not going to make a fight against the very men with whom they made compacts at the General Election.
Take Mr. J. liatnsay Macdonald, for example. He made a compact with the Liberals of Leicester, because he was more anxious to get to the House of Commons than to fight the enemies of the working class. At the meeting at the Temperance Hall, Leicester, held on January 5th, where he was adopted, he expressed himself in hearty sympathy with the proposals of the government, as voiced by Sir H. Campbell Bannerman in his Albert Hall speech, and asked the working men of Leicester to use both votes in order that Mr. Broadhurst and himself might be returned. He explained that “both the L.R.C. and the Trades Council had declared against ‘plumping’ in order that every member might utilise both his votes to return two Progressives, and so promote the more urgently needed industrial reforms.” And the speech which he delivered after the poll was declared, quoted in our March issue, amply proves that he was returned to support the capitalist Liberal Government, not to put up a fight against it.
Then there is Mr. Will Crooks, M.P., who is also supposed to be one of the “independent” Labour M.P’s. There has hardly been a Liberal function of any importance since the General Election that Mr. Crooks has not attended. In April, for instance, he and his wife were present at a back-scratching banquet at the Trocadero, which included “some of the best known names in Liberal politics.” The Lord Chancellor presided, Dr. Macnamara and Mr. H. C. Lea, M.P., were the head cooks and bottle washers, John Burns and Lord Monkswell spoke, and Mr. James Stuart and Sir H. Campbell Bannerman sent their congratulations by letter. The speeches mainly concerned the “great Radical victory,” and many were the references to “the dark days from which Liberalism had just emerged.” Does any sane person expect that Mr. Crooks is going to “put up a real fight” against the exploiters whose hospitality he is so willing to accept ?
Of course, at this function Mr. Crooks did not preach about the evils of drinking, smoking and gambling. That he reserves for the class to which he once belonged. It is part of the decoy-duck game he is playing for the capitalists.
Then we have Mr. Will Thorne, M.P., now made a Justice of the Peace for the Borough of West Ham, in which capacity he will be called upon to punish those victims of the capitalist system who have offended against capitalist laws, passed to protect capitalist property and capitalist institutions. Mr. Thorne is a member of the S.D.F., who, no doubt, will claim that a “revolutionary Social Democrat” can serve the working class and at the same time serve in the capacity of a tool of the capitalist class. There is now no real difference between Burns and Thorne, excepting that Burns is well paid for his job and Thorne is one of the great unpaid.
I am here reminded of the words of Wilhelm Liebknecht: “A Socialist who goes into a bourgeois government, either goes over to the enemy or else puts himself in the power of the enemy. … He may claim to be a Socialist, but he is no longer such. He may be convinced of his own sincerity, but in that case he has not comprehended the nature of the class struggle—does not understand that the class struggle is the basis of Socialism.”
Before elected persons can put up a real fight they must be elected to do so, they must have a guiding principle and a definite policy. They must know what they want and how they must go to work to get it. And above all, they must have the knowledge that behind their actions lies the full strength of the electors who voted for them and the non-electors who also helped to return them. They must clear their minds of the fallacy that place necessarily means power for those claiming to represent the working class. That power can only come when the working class understand their position, and will return men as rebels. “No compromise” must be the watchword, and as the “Labour” M.P’s have not been returned as rebels, as they do not endeavour to enlighten the working class as to their position of wage slaves, as they merely hanker after reforms in a mild and quite respectable manner, they are useless to the working class, and therefore are, as they must be, a failure.
The dispute in the London Printing Trade has, apparently, only ended as far as the Compositors are concerned, and it is quite evident that in ending it the Compositors were guilty of two false moves—one in not recognising that the matter affected all the workers in the industry, and therefore that all should have been considered and consulted before any agreement was entered into, and another in falling so easily into the trap laid for them by the astute newspaper proprietors, who in future will form a separate employers’ organisation, apart from the Master Printers’ Association. If the Compositors were in a position to exact terms from the masters, they should have insisted that the cause of one employer should be considered the cause of all, that all the employers should join one and the same masters’ association, and thus action against one would have been action against all. The policy of the working class is to get all its enemies, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, into one body in front of it.
A great and enthusiastic throng gathered together at the National Liberal Club on Friday,June 16th to meet the members of the Government and to make merry over the Liberal victory. As might be expected, the Social Democratic Federation was represented—by Mr. A. E. Fletcher.
Mr. W. P. Byles has taken upon himself the whitewashing of Asquith, who, he claims, was in no way responsible for the murder of the Featherstone Miners. Against Mr. Byles’ opinion we have Asquith’s own avowal, previously quoted in these columns. It was made at Glasgow on the l7th October, 1893, and he said :—”In his character as Secretary of State for the Home Department, it had been his duty to take executive action in more than one of those cases for the maintenance of the law and for the prevention of disorderand he accepted the full responsibility for everything that had been done.”
Of course, whatever Asquith’s whitewashers may say, Asquith is bound to take the responsibility. If he repudiated it, it would be tantamount to admitting that the Imperial troops could be ordered to murder in cold blood the Imperial workers, at the instance of a local capitalist, without the consent of the Executive Government. It is too much to expect a member of the Executive Government to plead that the Government does not control the Executive’s forces, and therefore Asquith takes the full responsibility. And glories in it, gloats over it, smiles in grim satisfaction at the thought that his class had so crushed the workers as to make it possible, without a protest, either from the workers outside or from the “Labou ” Members who were then inside the House. They did not “put up a real fight” then, any more than the present “Labour” members will over questions which really concern the working class.
J.KAY